


come home to me

by zxanthe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, F/M, Tumblr, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 06:45:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16849123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zxanthe/pseuds/zxanthe
Summary: Every morning they’d walk together to the subway station and go to school and every evening Jade would sit on the bench and wait the extra twenty minutes for Dave and together they’d walk home, clasped hands swinging between them.





	come home to me

**Author's Note:**

> originally published July 18, 2017 on tumblr  
> prompt: _skadventuretime asked: make me hurt. a sad kiss._  
>  based on [this post](http://zxanthe.tumblr.com/post/129505307243/synco-an-au-in-which-dave-and-jade-are-in-love)

There is a vast black space yawning in her chest. It’s gotten to the point that most days she can drown it out with exercise and homework and her latest pet project, but at night when she’s all alone in a bed that’s too big for one person in a room where once upon a time that empty inside her was filled up with stars, with entire galaxies, with whole and perfect _universes –_

_(Loneliness is nothing new to Jade Harley. When she first arrived on the mainland, everything was so loud and close and immediate, demanding her attention, constantly in her face. The kids in school would eye her and call her names and whisper about her when they thought she wasn’t listening and sometimes when they thought she was, all because they did not know what to make of her, wild-haired too-clever island girl who knew nothing of their ways and did not seem to care)_

– she breaks. Her hand will reach across the covers for someone who isn’t there, and then she’s kneeling on the floor with her face buried in an old shirt of his, shivering, weeping quietly, because her best friend is gone and she knows he’s never coming back.

_(They met in college. He was studying film and she was studying physics and when he heard her playing her bass in the park he put a hundred dollars in her tip jar at the end of her performance and asked her out to dinner. She found out that his name was Dave Strider and he liked sick beats and shitty comics, and he made her laugh more than anyone ever had)_

After three weeks, she files a missing person report. A part of her goes cold wondering if she’s waited too long and another part tells her that she’s overreacting, that of course he’ll be back, he’s fine. But he hasn’t picked up his phone in twenty-two days. It’s an extravagantly craptastic flip phone that’s at least a decade old; he has it because _this shit is ironic as hell harley cmon look at it its fuckin glorious._ It is never off his person for long _._ She wonders if there’s even enough space left on it to store all the messages she’s left.

 _(After a year they move in together. With their combined incomes, they’re able to rent a cramped one-bedroom apartment near downtown. The kitchen is outdated and the furniture is probably older than they are, but the view is amazing and it’s_ theirs. _Every morning they’d walk together to the subway station and go to school and every evening Jade would sit on the bench and wait the extra twenty minutes for Dave and together they’d walk home, clasped hands swinging between them)_

Dave Strider was always precisely on time. To him, being early was uncool and being late was straight up disrespectful. That first night, when the subway doors opened and he didn’t come out, she’d called him. It had gone straight to voicemail. Frowning, she’d waited another fifteen minutes for the next train before walking home alone, figuring that maybe he’d had to stay late studying and his phone had died. Or something. But Jade couldn’t shake the oily disquiet from the back of her mind and it only grew when he didn’t come back the next night, or the next night, or the next. Disquiet turned to worry turned to a dark and hopeless sort of grief. Every night, she waited for him, and every night that he didn’t come out of the train took a little more out of her. She saw his face on the news and wanted to weep. She didn’t know what else to do but drive around the city at night, searching for him, putting up posters on telephone poles and internet forums. More than anything in the world, she missed him.

They find the body three months after he disappeared.

Dave had missed his train and decided to walk home instead. His old flip phone had given up at last and so he couldn’t call for help when the car appeared out of nowhere and slammed into him, sending him flying. Instead of calling an ambulance, the driver dumped his body in the tall weeds under the overpass. He died cold and alone and in pain. They still don’t know who did it. When they told Jade all this she’d sat there numbly. When she arrived back at the apartment, she’d curled up into a ball and wept.

 _(In her dreams he comes home in the late afternoon, when thick golden sunlight pours through the windows of the apartment and lights the city up so bright it’s almost blinding. She’s studying, or cooking dinner, or tinkering on some fantastic, impossible machine and she looks up and he’s walking through the doorway, plonking his gear down on the table as if he was never gone. The joy she feels at the sight of him is indescribable, brighter than the sunlight pooling on the floor, lighter than the dust motes dancing in the beams. When she flings herself into his waiting arms it’s like coming home._ sup harley, _he’ll murmur in her ear,_ wow hey stop crying im here im home now. _His mouth is warm and soft and tastes sort of like apples and mostly like salt and she always wakes with the taste of him bright on her tongue)_

She gets her doctorate. She moves to a different city and takes a different train, but she always waits an extra twenty minutes after getting off. It feels wrong not to, she supposes. Dave would think it’s silly, but she gets the feeling that somewhere, somehow, he appreciates it all the same.


End file.
